Think first and act a little later

The composer Benjamin Britten was renowned for working on his pieces intensely and completing them quickly. His ‘Cantata Misericordium’ was due to be performed at the centenary celebrations of the Red Cross on the 1st of September 1963, and Britten composed it in May that year. This was very fast going for a major and complex piece of music.

Britten had, however, received the request for the piece at least eighteen months previously. He was very grateful for this because it enabled him to work in his preferred way, which was to give plenty of time to thinking and reflecting upon his approach before actually putting pencil to manuscript.

This period of contemplation and reflection enabled him to compose fluently and quickly because, as he sat down to write, he already had a clear idea of the overall feel and form of the piece and the key effects he wanted to achieve.

Frequently when problem solving we can confuse activity with effectiveness. We can dive headlong into problem solving without first taking a few steps back and pausing to reflect upon the overall nature of the problem, its context, its interrelated aspects and the various options and techniques available for solving it. When we do this we do not allow our more intuitive, big picture thinking to have the space it needs to influence and guide our actions.

Most of us are very unlikely to have the amount of advance notice of our problems that Britten had for his commission. We should not, however, discount the importance of allocating a meaningful amount of the time that we do have to thinking and reflecting rather than activity and action.

Time spent in contemplation and reflection is time well spent, as it enhances our overall understanding of our problems, clarifies our options for addressing them and can help guide our decisions about the activities and actions we eventually undertake.

If you think first and act a little later you may be pleasantly surprised by how intensely you can work and how quickly and effectively you can address the problems before you.

Dissect your thought-worms

A while back a BBC Radio 3 presenter explored the concept of ear-worms. These are melodies and fragments of music that despite our best endeavours play in our minds over and over again, like an auditory itch that cannot be scratched. 

The melodies that become ear-worms vary from person to person. Some of my own ear-worms are the Imperial March from the film Star Wars and the opening of Elgar’s 1st Symphony. Sometimes I just cannot get these tunes out of my head! What ear-worms do you have? 

We suffer from thought-worms in a similar way. These are ideas, questions and intuitive feelings that burrow away noisily within our minds. 

The reason we become so distracted by both ear and thought-worms is their insistent, repetitive and unchanging nature. Over and over again we hear and experience the same things and the more we try not to hear or think about them the louder and more persistent they become. 

The Radio 3 presenter encouraged her listeners to embrace and celebrate their ear-worms: to find out more about them, to examine their characteristics and place them within the broader context of the music as a whole. 

You can do similar with your thought-worms. Rather than becoming trapped within a repeating loop of thoughts and feelings you can interrupt the process.

 

Dissect your thought-worms and examine them. From where did they originate? What makes them so fascinating and insistent? What is the bigger picture or context that surrounds them? What important feelings or messages underpin them? What new directions could they point out and what discoveries could they help you unearth? 

By uncovering the mysterious attractions of your thought-worms you will discover their true meanings and the resulting insights you gain will shake your thoughts out of their repetitive loops and help steer them in new and stimulating directions.

Using music to turn conflict into manageable and helpful paradoxes

The complex issues, problems and paradoxes at the heart of modern life cannot be solved without effective collaboration, and the musical world is very good at it!

Visualise a symphony orchestra. Now imagine the complex collaboration needed to form, maintain and develop it. Think about the additional and intense collaboration needed during its performances.

Now consider how much more difficult it would be to achieve all of this within an environment of extreme uncertainty, conflict and attrition.

Surely the lessons learnt whilst achieving this would be of immense value to all of us, whatever our walk of life.

My interests in music, creativity and collaborative working do not often come together so obviously and dramatically as they did when I viewed this short presentation by Paul MacAlindin, Music Director of the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq:

Paul MacAlindin youtube presentation

He talks about his collaboration with others to form and develop the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq. At the heart of his talk is an exploration of the ability of musical collaboration to take conflicts and turn them into paradoxes that can be managed to create positive and valuable results.

It has given me plenty to reflect upon as I continue to develop my understanding of creativity and the complex world of collaborative working. I hope it does the same for you.


Stop press!

The National Youth Orchestra of Iraq is shortly to tour the USA! For more information and to find out how you can help click here:

  http://charleslines.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/national-youth-orchestra-of-iraq.html

Practise detachment to gain success

1. Identify, perfect and repeat your winning habits.
2. Use your winning habits knowing that over time they will bring you consistent and great success.
3. Detach your winning habits from the specific results you achieve at any given instant.
4. The evidence will tell you that repeating your winning habits gives you huge and consistent success over time. It is this that matters, not what might or might not happen at any give instant of any given day.

I was in my last year at music college. I had spent three years honing my trumpet playing skills, developing my technique and adopting good playing habits.

The day of my final recital was swiftly approaching and I decided to give a public performance in a local church, as a kind of dress rehearsal.

It did not go well. The pianist accompanying me could not play his part. Even the acoustics in the hall seemed to work against me, making my playing seem distant and thin in tone. In addition, it was a very hot day and the church doors had been left open to let in the fresh air -- and the sound of heavy traffic from the main road. Not unsurprisingly, my concentration was upset and my playing adversely affected. The experience was in no way a good preparation for my final recital, quite the reverse in fact!

I finished playing. A disconsolate blend of half-hearted applause and traffic noise accompanied me as I left the stage. I quickly left the church and went to the local pub to drown my sorrows.

The next day I described the experience to my trumpet teacher. He listened, expressed his sympathy and concern and then said, 'All your hard work and carefully developed technique and habits have obviously deserted you then, and you have become a bad player overnight! Might as well give up!'. Importantly, he said this with a smile on his face, and I immediately got the message.

Over the next week I focused upon consolidating and developing the good technique and habits that my teacher and I had been working on over the years. As the hours and days went by the unpleasant memories of my last recital began to fade from my mind, and as they became more distant I was able to view them with detachment. It was a bad experience, but there were specific reasons why it had happened, reasons I could learn from. 

And, importantly, my good playing technique and habits were still strong and intact.

The day of my final recital arrived. I trusted in my carefully developed skills and habits.
The performance went well. When it had counted, my winning habits had provided me with the success I sought.         

Sometimes, however hard we work, circumstances work against us and we do not achieve the results we want or need.

But if we concentrate on doing the right things and developing the right habits these situations will be the exception to the rule. We will tend to have more successes than failures. At the very least we will be able to get up more times than we are knocked down!

So, when developing a new skill or addressing a challenge that is important to you remember the four points given above. Develop your own set of winning habits. Detach them from the results you achieve at any given instant of any given day; focus on the bigger picture. Trust that your carefully developed habits will win through in the end.

Lose the piano

When Prokofiev wrote his ‘Classical Symphony’ it was the first time he had composed without the aid of a piano.

Whilst writing, straight from head to page, he would have conceived the symphony in purely orchestral terms, unencumbered by the mediation of the piano and the constraints of its keyboard. It is highly likely that this change of compositional approach contributed significantly to the work’s immediacy of style and brilliantly colourful scoring. 

If you want to enhance your approach to problem solving, or indeed anything else that matters to you, practise doing it without the aid of the crutches you have formed the habit of relying upon for support. If preparing for a presentation forgo the pre-prepared script. If you are writing a report put your usual template aside for a while. If attempting to solve a problem loosen and then remove the shackles of your habitual problem solving approaches.

Explore how it feels to do things in a different, more immediate way. Allow your mind to engage directly with the task before you, rather than via the medium of your well-worn tools, methods and approaches.

Make your thinking quick and nimble and your ideas bright and sharp. Lose the piano. Identify those things that weigh heavily upon and constrict your thinking. Work at heaving them out of the way. It will feel difficult at first, but as you persevere you will gain the confidence and strength to grapple directly with the problem at hand and go straight from head to task.

Smart practice involves four steps: here is the fourth and last

Early on during my final year at music school I went to my weekly piano lesson. My teacher greeted me. I sat at the piano and took out the pieces I had been practising and put them on the music stand. She pushed them to one side and put another piece in front of me.

The piece seemed to go on forever; it was a very fast ‘dance study’ and every bar was packed full of notes. I gasped and said, ‘This is impossible, there is no way I can play this!’
My teacher smiled and said, ‘I know, but by the end of this year not only will you be able to play it, you will include it in your final graded recital.’

I did, eventually, learn to play it, and yes, I did include it in my final recital, where it made
quite an impression on my examiners. To this day I am amazed that I managed to perform it!

4. Set yourself initially unachievable goals

If you set yourself goals that you know you can achieve you are saying to yourself that you already have the skills and attributes needed to attain them. Therefore the possibility of you developing new skills or even enhancing existing ones is very limited. Also, it is very unlikely that you will produce any outstanding, memorable or ground breaking results.

When setting yourself goals for what you want to achieve and the skills you want to develop create ambitious goals that will demand that you learn to do new things and deliver what was previously impossible for you. This way, even if you fail to achieve your goal you will still make more progress, learn more things and gain more skills than you would have done if you had avoided risk and aimed at easier targets.

For example, if you set yourself a goal of presenting a subject that is new to you in a way that is different from your usual approach, say more participative rather than lecturing in style, you will have to learn new knowledge and new participative techniques. You will also need to do plenty of deliberate and focused practice in order to become familiar and comfortable with the techniques and implement them to a consistently acceptable standard.

Obviously the first few times you use the new knowledge and techniques it will feel somewhat strange, and perhaps the presentation will not be as polished as it would have been if you had played safe and presented in a way more familiar to you, but the gains to your development and the enrichment of your skills and abilities will far outweigh any initial difficulties or drawbacks experienced. It is also likely that the ambitious approach of your presentation will make it much more memorable and influential than would otherwise have been the case.            

Speaking personally, I was offered the opportunity to deliver a high profile presentation about creative problem solving to a very large audience made up of Civil Servants from all over the country and from very many different Departments.

The goal I set myself was to create a presentation that was engaging and participative even though the audience I was presenting to was very large, in excess of 300 people. I had to find new examples of creative problem solving that were very memorable, engaging and also relevant to the work and activities of my audience. In addition, I had to find new ways to demonstrate creative problem solving techniques that would make them clear and understandable to everybody in the audience. Lastly, I had to find new ways to get such a large number of people involved and participating in my presentation.

This all seemed very daunting. At the outset of my preparations I was not clear about how I could achieve any of it. However, as I did my research and my work progressed I did find additional examples, ideas and techniques that would enable me to gain participation, engagement and understanding from my audience.

I became familiar with the examples, ideas and techniques and thought carefully about how I would use them. I also carefully and repeatedly practised and rehearsed their use.

On the day, my delivery of the presentation went well. My preparation and rehearsal paid off, with the vast majority of the audience responding very positively.

There were areas, especially with regard to gaining participation and engaging with my audience, that I could have done better, but this was to be expected given that this was the first time I had presented to such a large number of people and I had not used some of the approaches and techniques in front of a live audience before.

Overall the positives far outweighed the negatives. Taking on the challenge and setting myself such an ambitious goal forced me to learn and do new things that I would not have learnt or done otherwise, and they will be of great use to me in the future when I deliver more presentations to large audiences.

Smart practice involves four steps: here is the third

A young pianist could play with great dynamism and vitality, but occasionally her performances were marred by technical inaccuracies and mistakes. The pianist’s teacher loved the passionate playing and encouraged it, but also wanted to add some crystal clear, laser - like clarity to it. The teacher asked the young pianist to deliberately concentrate upon certain scales, arpeggios and studies that challenged her technique, to carefully practise them until her playing was consistently accurate and crystal clear. The pianist was then asked to play a piece she knew well and concentrate upon being not only dynamic and vital but also crystal clear in her execution.

Her dynamism caught fire! 

3. Create developmental synergy by integrating newly developed skills with existing strengths

Having built upon strengths and addressed weaknesses by developing new skills, the next stage is to assimilate or integrate the new skills with existing strengths, so that they become an integral part of your unique mix of skills and attributes. Again, to be effective this needs to be done in a methodical, logical and specific way that involves plenty of practice. A good, practical technique that can be used to achieve this is the 1+1=3 Technique.

The 1+1=3 Technique involves taking a specific existing strength and a specific newly developed skill and finding a way to create a new skill that incorporates aspects of the two existing ones.

For example, one of your existing strengths may be your in depth, expert knowledge of a subject. A new skill you may have developed could be the effective use of presentation notes. A way to combine these two attributes would be to use the notes to remind yourself of examples and illustrations that are familiar and relevant to your audience. This will create the third skill of being able to speak not only knowledgeably but also practically and understandably, of being able to use examples and ideas that an audience can engage with and comprehend.

Another example could involve your existing strength in the use of PowerPoint and a recently developed ability in effectively fielding and dealing with questions from an audience. A way of combining these two skills would be to use PowerPoint to structure, prompt and pace question and answer sessions. This would build on your ability to field questions by adding a third skill of being able to manage and pace question and answer sessions and even influence the types of questions asked and the order in which they are presented.

A third example could involve your natural enthusiasm and energy and a recently developed skill in using participative techniques. You could combine your enthusiasm and energy with participative techniques to create a third skill of being able to encourage reciprocal enthusiasm and energy from your audiences.

The key to using the above 1+1=3 Technique is to work at forcing an existing strength and newly developed skill together until you find a third useful outcome. It is also important to keep an open mind as to how the two aspects could combine or influence each other.